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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

Anthony Burgess

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Anthony Burgess
Age: 76 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 25
Died: 1993
Died: November 22
Author
Autobiographer
Composer
Dramaturge
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Creators
Creator
Great
Downtrodden
Slang

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
Anthony Burgess
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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
Anthony Burgess
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
Anthony Burgess
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
Anthony Burgess
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As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
Anthony Burgess
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
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All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
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Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
Anthony Burgess
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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
Anthony Burgess
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess